Educational Science

NASA confirms success of DART mission, proving humanity can deflect killer asteroids with rockets

Roughly five months after intentionally crashing a rocket into a distant asteroid, NASA has some good news: The mission was a smashing success, and similar methods could prevent Earth from being obliterated by planet-killing space rocks in the future, according to four new studies published in the journal Nature. I...

'Building blocks of life' recovered from asteroid Ryugu are older than the solar system itself

The asteroid Ryugu, which orbits the sun between Earth and Mars, contains many of the building blocks for life, a new analysis finds. The study, published Feb. 23 in the journal Science, is one of the first peeks at the samples from Ryugu brought back by Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft in...

Asteroids constantly zoom around our solar system and sometimes smash into planets, including Earth. As such, in the name of planetary defense NASA conducted a test, dubbed DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), to deflect a space rock like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs (or the one Bruce Willis...

'Potentially hazardous' asteroid twice the size of the World Trade Center will shoot past Earth tonight

An asteroid the size of five to 10 football fields will zip safely by Earth tonight (Feb. 15). At its closest approach, asteroid (199145) 2005 YY128 will still be about 2.8 million miles (4.5 million kilometers) from Earth, or 12 times the average distance between Earth and the moon. However,...

'Potentially hazardous' asteroid that recently zipped past Earth is an elongated weirdo with an odd rotation

Astronomers recently got an up-close look at a potentially hazardous asteroid as it whizzed safely past Earth, and what they saw caught them by surprise: The space rock is unusually elongated for an asteroid and is spinning much more slowly than expected. The asteroidal anomaly, known as 2011 AG5, was...

Newly discovered asteroid the size of a swimming pool has a 1-in-600 chance of colliding with Earth, NASA says

Update: On March 15, NASA and ESA updated their predictions, which now show the asteroid has a 1-in-1,584 chance to hit Earth in 2046. These odds will almost certainly drop to zero in the coming weeks, ESA officials added. A newly discovered asteroid may make a perilously close approach to...

Key building block for life discovered on distant asteroid Ryugu — and it could explain how life on Earth began

For the first time, scientists have found one of the key building blocks for RNA on an asteroid in space. The discovery indicates that the blueprints for life may have been brought to Earth from beyond our planet, and that rudimentary forms of life could exist elsewhere in the solar...

Eerie green fireball detected hours before smashing into Lake Ontario in the dead of night

At half past 3:00 a.m. (EST) on Nov. 19, a bright green fireball streaked through the sky over the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada. Witnesses reported seeing a helicopter-like object cruising silently through the air before lighting up huge swathes of the night like an enormous lightning bolt. After...